The Architect and the Sculptor: A Friendship of Ideas

Great, lasting friendships are rare, but friendships that enlarge the spirit through ideas, ideals and new insights are in a class by themselves. Over a stretch of more than 50 years, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the visionary designer R. Buckminster Fuller enjoyed such a friendship, which led to aesthetic and practical achievements that left their mark.

The course of their varied collaborations is traced in "Best of Friends: Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi," at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City. Put together by Shoji Sadao, former director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and an architect who was a longtime friend, collaborator and business partner of the two men, the exhibition includes models, sculptures, drawings, photographs and film.

Noguchi and Fuller first met in 1929 at Romany Marie's, a tavern in Greenwich Village that was a hot spot for creative types. Noguchi (1904-1988), who had quit pre-medical studies at Columbia University to become a sculptor, was freshly back from Paris. He had traveled there on a Guggenheim fellowship and served for six months as studio assistant to Brancusi, although the realistic portrait busts he made to earn a living seemed to belie the avant-garde ideas he had absorbed.

Fuller (1895-1983), known to friends as Bucky, had already designed his famous Dymaxion House (1927-28), an inexpensive, technically advanced structure that could be mass-produced and airlifted to its destination. A regular at Marie's, where he held forth on his ideas for hours, Fuller had decorated her new tavern on Minetta Street, covering the walls with shiny aluminum paint.

Captivated by Fuller's Yankee can-do spirit and his ambitious futurist agenda, Noguchi emulated him by painting his own studio silver (preceding by some years Andy Warhol's silvering of his "Factory" quarters). And he made a bust of Fuller in chrome-plated bronze, on view in the show.

The Noguchi-Fuller friendship, with its mutual view of life as an exploration, took hold during Fuller's seven sittings for the bust, completed in 1929. In the ensuing Great Depression, the two often shared living quarters, and occasionally exhibited together.

Noguchi's first collaboration with Fuller occurred in 1932 on the Dymaxion Car, an attempt to develop an automobile that could also fly, by means of collapsible wings inflated with air or gas. The teardrop-shaped, streamlined vehicle that resulted had two front wheels that drove it and a third at the rear for steering, but no wings. It was highly fuel-efficient.

Noguchi was assigned to make a three-dimensional plaster model of the car in the design stage. (His original no longer exists, but a replica is on display.) A comparison with the full-size finished car reveals that its shape was modified to accommodate the rear-mounted engine and the suspension system. On view, in addition to a blown-up photograph of the car, is a wonderfully detailed 3D model of its body and chassis, made in 2005 in 1/10 scale.

Photo

"Octetra," a reinforced fiberglass sculpture by Isamu Noguchi evoking Buckminster Fuller designs, at the Noguchi Museum.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Sadly, the first prototype, produced in a factory in Bridgeport, Conn., and shown to an enthusiastic public in July 1933, was hit in the rear by another car and rolled over, killing the driver. Two more prototypes were released, but the accident cast a pall over the car's future, and it never went into assembly-line production.

Meanwhile, Noguchi was involved in all sorts of other design projects: three large-scale public parks in 1933-34 (only one of which was realized, years later); the first of his famous sets for Martha Graham's dance company in 1935; a political mural for a market in Mexico City in 1936, stainless steel reliefs for the Associated Press Building entrance in Rockefeller Center (1938-40); and a biomorphic coffee table (1944) for the furniture maker Herman Miller that has become a classic.

These and other achievements are touched on in the show, but the emphasis is on Noguchi's work with Fuller. Although Fuller had no academic credentials, his ideas found expression in engineering, architecture and what he called "energetic-synergetic geometry," or geometry as found in nature.

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From his study of it, he devised a structural system that Noguchi adapted for his own use, "tensegrity," as Fuller later called it. In this system taut, light tension units, rather than heavy-compression ones, carry primary loads and give the whole its structural integrity. The principle is illustrated by a bicycle wheel whose rim and hub are held in place by the tensile spokes. At the same time, the sculptor Kenneth Snelson, then a student of Fuller's at Black Mountain College, was working on a similar idea.

In Fuller's Dymaxion House the walls and floors were suspended from a hexagonal ring by tension cables that came out from the top of an aluminum mast. In 1943 Noguchi used the tensegrity principle in a sculpture, "Monument to Heroes," by replacing the Dymaxion House mast with a wooden tube drilled with holes through which he stuck a piece of bone, a propeller-shaped piece of wood and other objects, all held in a tensile web. The work became an abstract symbol for pilots who died in World War II.

By 1947-48, Fuller was working up models for what was to become his best-known development, the geodesic dome, a geometrical "space frame" in the form of a hemisphere made up of short, straight, lightweight bars that form a strong grid of polygons. Adaptable to houses or large-scale arenas, it drew worldwide attention in a design made in partnership with Mr. Sadao and Geometrics Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., for the United States Pavilion for Expo '67, the World's Fair in Montreal.

The closest Noguchi and Fuller came to a collaboration in their later years was in 1976, on an unrealized theater for Martha Graham. Plans called for a cylindrical, drum-shaped building proposed by Noguchi, with a ground-floor storage and display area for the sets he had designed for Graham, and a second-floor theater space for performances. The entire building — seen in the exhibition in a model — would be enclosed by a Fuller-designed geodesic dome. But for some reason, it didn't happen.

However, in 1986, Noguchi made a gracefully sculptural adaptation from Fuller's energetic-synergetic geometry, which viewed the tetrahedron, a solid having four triangular sides, as the basic building block of the cosmos. Noguchi's "Challenger 7 Memorial," installed in the Noguchi-Sadao-designed Bayfront Park in Miami, is a 100-foot-high tetrahelix, a spiraling tower composed of 31 tetrahedrons joined to one another in the twisting helical pattern of DNA genetic material (as discovered by J. D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1953).

In Noguchi's view the tetrahelix symbolizes man's exploration of the mysteries of nature, and his sculpture, represented in the show by a model and a large photograph, is a tribute to the astronauts who died in the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 while taking part in that exploration.

And the show, nicely packed into the museum's small galleries, is a tribute to a great friendship between two minds teeming with ideas.